Celonis for Student Consultancies – Academy Consult at Murtfeldt Kunststoffe

As Munich's top student consultancy, Academy Consult, has already finalized more than 500 projects to the complete satisfaction of customers in the last 20 years.

The approach is both simple and trend-setting: student consultants apply the knowledge they have acquired at university to consulting projects in practice, thus mastering the challenges of customers.

The founders of Celonis themselves were members of Academy Consult and conducted their first ever project together as student consultants at the Bavarian Broadcasting. This is where they used Process Mining technology for the first time and got the idea to build a company from it.

As part of the Celonis Academic Alliance program “Process Mining Experts”, the consultants from Academy Consult conducted a one-month certification training to learn and acquire skills in the Celonis Execution Management System. Celonis was eager to hear how the consultants used their expertise in a project at Murtfeldt Kunststoffe.

Julia Holl, a student consultant from the Academy Consult, shared the team's experience:

Get to know the customer

Murtfeldt Kunststoffe GmbH & Co. KG is one of the world's leading manufacturers of individually manufactured components made of engineering plastics and high-performance plastics, which are used in particular in mechanical engineering and plant construction. Due to the focus on custom-made products, there is a great deal of effort and complexity between the order system and the start of production. The goal of our project was to use process mining to analyze the processes from the creation of an order to the start of production in order to identify weaknesses and point out optimization potentials. 

How it started

In preparation for analyzing the processes, we first familiarized ourselves with both the offer and order processes and connected Murtfeldt's workflow and ERP system to the Execution Management System. A few small adjustments had to be made to connect the data to facilitate the later analysis. 

Then, the construction of the dashboards began and an initial analysis of the processes was carried out, during which superficial anomalies were initially collected. These were then validated with the customer to clarify possible correlations and causal relationships and to prioritize the points found for deeper analysis. 

In the subsequent detailed analysis, the anomalies were analyzed in more detail and optimization potential was uncovered.  

The investigative process 

The process that was analyzed in the course of the project is divided into two sub-processes: The creation of the offer and the creation of the order. Since the two were not necessarily related and not every offer was converted into an order, they had to be considered separately.  

How we helped

With the help of Celonis, the two processes were examined in more detail and a total of ten anomalies were identified. Through a deeper analysis of these, optimization potentials were uncovered and recommendations for action were derived. For example, the impact of a high offering size on the conversion rate between offer and order was determined and the development of a new pricing strategy was evaluated in order to price special cases accordingly. 

Just the start

This project was one of the first process mining projects of a Junior Enterprise in Germany, which is why we, as a project team, were able to further expand our competences in this area. And, as an association, we were able to learn a lot about the acquisition and the handling of such a project. 

Academy Consult Munich will use the experience gained to uncover execution gaps with further customers in the future and thus expand the process landscape, especially in the SME sector. Among other things, we are planning a follow-up project with Murtfeldt Kunststoffe to investigate the effectiveness of the implemented recommendations for action and to analyze the processes comparatively a second time.

If you want to hear more stories like Julia's, see up-coming Academic Alliance events, or get in touch with the team, check out the Academic Alliance page to learn more.

Julia Holl

Student Consultant from Academy Consult